CategorySilicon Age

Black Mirror is a Netflix anthology series exploring the darkness of technology and its uses in the near future. It’s easy to see why it’s become so popular with mainstream audiences: the tech itself is at once wildly inventive and shockingly close to digital tools in our lives today. In addition, the show touches on familiar life things like dating, politics, workplace culture, and...

Through the story of the article, I have a general image understanding and usage of PDA and brainpal. Here is a sketch of my PDA and brainpal.I think a PDA is like a mobile phone or a tablet. It is an electronic product that can be carried around with a pen. I think its functions are very similar to that of a mobile phone, navigation, alarm clock, touch screen, etc. But the functions seem to be...

Below are some sketches of how I envisioned the technology described in the science fiction novel Old Man’s War by John Scalzi. PDa The PDA is a Personal Device Assistant that helps recruiters get by their day-to-day, like a smartphone. Recruiters are able to check times, get directions, set alarms, make appointments, check menus, etc. BrainPal The BrainPal is like a PDA but it’s...

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Below sketches are the hypothetical BrainPal and Personal Data Assistant (PDA) interfaces from the fictional novel Old Man’s War.

I am imagining the interaction between the brain and the body to be like controlling a muppet with strings, only that the “muppet” here is in a neural sense and the “strings” idea is representative of the sensors in the body. In this interface, human senses are represented visually, such as the sense of direction, memorized events, pain detection, sounds and smell. There...

PDA, short for Personal Data Assistant, is a data collection device described in the science fiction Old Man’s War by John Scalzi. In the same book, the author also described the concept of a device with no screen and is embedded within the user’s brain, with the appropriate name of BrainPal, which reminds me a lot of the “no-interface interface” concept of today, except...

The PDA and BrainPal in Old man’s War In Old Man’s War, a military-focused science fiction novel by John Scalzi, protagonist John Perry comes face-to-face with some startlingly intuitive technology. A trainee for the Colonial Defense Forces, he is equipped with a Personal Data Assistant (PDA), which is some kind of handheld touchscreen device, and a BrainPal, which appears to be...